A Few Tweaks for Live Writer

By on August 18, 2006 in Tech

I’ve been using Live Writer to write my posts for the last several days.  I still like it a lot, but I have now used it enough to suggest a few new features it needs.

1. An option to send pings only on the initial publication of the post.  I don’t want to re-ping when I edit to fix the invariable typo.

2. A way to save templates.  All of us have repetitive posts that contain a lot of the same elements.  Give us a way to save and pull up multiple templates.  Sure you can do it now by creating drafts, but that doesn’t work nearly as well as a separate template menu would work.  For one thing, the naming convention doesn’t lend itself to doing it that way.

3. I don’t know what it is exactly, but there is a keyboard command for publishing that I have accidentally hit 4 times in 4 days.  This is an unnecessary caps-lock sort of annoyance.  Give us the ability to customize- or delete entirely- keyboard commands.

4. While I enjoy the WYSIWYG interface, the resulting html is jumbled beyond recognition.  Can’t we clean it up a little with spaces between the paragraphs, etc.? Blogger’s editing application does this pretty well, so it shouldn’t be hard to implement.

And one new plugin I want…

5. One that will allow me to input the Amazon ISBN or ASIN number and generate a link with my Amazon Associates information included.

And one problem I have noticed…

6. For some reason, my new posts are not showing up as new in Bloglines.  When you click my feed, they are there, but my blog is not showing up in bold with the number of new posts in parenthesis like it used to and like it is supposed to.  Has anyone else noticed this?

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About Kent

Reader, writer, arithmeticer. Proprietor of Newsome.Org, a tech, music and life blog.
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  • http://www.beagooddad.com/ Mike

    Your bloglines hasn’t been updating for me either. That seems like a weird problem, but it might be something specific to bloglines with some of the trouble they are having. You should try doing a post the old way and see if bloglines picks up that one.

  • http://www.blogger.com/profile/00428649718647203180 Kent

    I may have found a workaround.Bloglines has a ping page I didn’t know about. I manually pinged Bloglines via that page and a post that was not showing up as new showed up. Since LW has the ability to ping when you publish, I am going to add a line to ping BL and see if that helps.